


Welcome Home

by BleakCinema



Series: New Americana [2]
Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV), Punisher (Comics)
Genre: Co-Parenting, Dysfunctional Family, Dysfunctional Relationships, Kid Fic, M/M, Matt's A+ Life Choices, hints of PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 04:01:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7027666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleakCinema/pseuds/BleakCinema
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frank comes home from a stake-out feeling like he's been through the wringer.  With Matt busy, Frank has some alone time with their five-year old son, Jack.  An introspective reflection on Frank, his son, his difficult relationship with the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, and how sometimes a truce feels an awful lot like winning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Welcome Home

New Americana - Welcome Home  


 

The wrought iron fence that ringed PS 111 was cold even through the hoodie that Frank wore, the chill bite of the metal pressing into his spine where he leaned against it, hands in his pockets.  He could feel winter coming in every part of him as he stood there, waiting patiently.  The military regulation crop he still wore after all these years did little to shield his head against the encroaching autumnal chill, even with the ball cap he wore pulled low.  When he slid his hand out to check his watch, the metal rim of it’s face leeched up the cold, spreading it to his skin wherever they touched.  It dutifully informed him that 14:40 was fast approaching.

 

He sniffed, the air rattling wetly in the old breaks of his nose.  He rolled his shoulders deeper into his hoodie, feeling kind of exposed just standing here out in the open, but resolved to wait.

 

Red had asked him to.

 

Behind him, the afternoon bell shrilled like a warning klaxon.  It knifed through the muffled still that the colder months always managed to bring with them, even to a place like Hell’s Kitchen.  The world seemed deafening in its absence when it ended a few seconds later.   Then came the stampede and Frank couldn’t help his amusement at the almost immediate pounding of feet that devoured the silence.  Happy shouts filled the air, all so young and full of the raucous joy of freedom.  Sitting behind a desk and staring at a clock was the worst oppression these kids could ever imagine.  He wished in some distant corner of himself that it never had to change even though life had taught him different long ago, even before the smattering of gray had appeared in his hair.  Some of them would get lucky, sure, but the world was too random and cruel to spare all of them.

 

He stared straight ahead when the heavier feet of older children thumped towards him, then onward, elsewhere.  Next would come the middle children, their legs not yet long enough to carry them as fast as the first escapees, but still old and big enough not to have to wait on parents.  In between would come bicycles and finally the youngest, shepherded by teachers like stray lambs into the waiting custody of their parents and guardians.  

 

The other parents stood in a gaggle off to the side, a loose alliance of playgroups, and playdates, and book clubs, and whatever else it was that normal folks got up to when they could afford to form idle attachments.

 

Frank just pulled his ball cap lower and turned his head slightly towards the gate.

 

He caught sight of Jack only a minute before the kid saw him and he felt the world turn on its axis just enough that he almost lost his bearings.  He could swear that Jack had grown since the last time he’d seen him, but it hadn’t been that long, had it? He measured him in his mind’s eye, tracking the inches and centimeters lost in the gulf between the then and the now.  Some softer part of him mourned each one.  He took in the soft waves of raven hair as deep black as his own and noted that he was probably long overdue for a haircut.  Wasn’t it just like Red to forget the small, aesthetic things? He was a little paler than the other kids around him, probably from long hours spent indoors studying.   The lightness of his skin made those ridiculous deep, expressive brown eyes he’d inherited from Matt pop as he looked around, probably trying to catch sight of the aforementioned Mr. Murdock.

 

Sensing his cue, Frank shouldered off of the cold fence and put himself squarely in Jack’s line of sight, “Hey champ, guess who?”

 

His voice sounded rough even to him.

 

He had a millisecond to watch his kid’s eyes grow the size of saucers, looking so perfectly like his dad for a minute that it stung, before he shrieked, “Papa!” 

 

By this point in his long and violent life, Frank had drowned (or very nearly) four times by his estimation.  He thought he knew intimately what it felt like to have the wind taken clean out of him.  Still, there was no comparing the feeling of helpless emptiness in his lungs when that tiny, solid body locked around his knees.  He looked at the teacher who had escorted his son out and all she did was smile indulgently.  Luckily, his (false) ID was on file with the school and this wasn’t the first time he’d picked Jack up, so there wasn’t any fuss.  To these people, he was just another father there to take his kid home.

 

He looked down and Jack was smiling up at him like he was goddamn Elvis and Mother Teresa and Johnny Cash all rolled into one.  The kid’s face was full of sunshine and he was grinning from ear to ear.  Frank noted there was a gap in his teeth where one of the little ones must have fallen out.  When had that happened? 

 

Jack sounded breathless with excitement when he spoke, “Papa, you came to pick me up! Is daddy here too?!”

 

The grin that overtook Frank’s face almost hurt, long unused muscles getting a workout, “Nah, Daddy’s got a big case he’s got to work on for a day or two.  I was back from work, so Daddy called and told me it was gonna be you and me, champ.”

 

The friggin’ kid couldn’t have looked more excited if Frank had told him Christmas was tomorrow.  It humbled Frank down to his marrow to be looked at like that, to know that the thought his mere, uninterrupted presence could put the kid in raptures.  He remembered it from years before, from Lisa and her little storybook he’d been too tired to read her one last time.  The years had turned that feeling sour and hot and painful in his stomach.  But having it real and right here in front of him again softened the heat to an almost gentle warmth, smoothed the edges of the pain to something practically bearable.

 

Tiny fingers squirmed up into his calloused palm and Frank carefully folded his hand around Jack’s.  

 

He shook off the ghosts of the past and started walking, leading Jack away from the milling chaos of the schoolyard, “Whaddaya say we swing by the grocery store and pick  up some ice cream? We can make milkshakes and watch movies,” he reached down to playfully ruffle the kid’s hair, “Maybe trim this mop, huh?”

 

Jack giggled, high pitched and unabashed in the way only children seemed to be able to, “Not a mop!” 

 

Frank feigned surprise, scooping Jack up in one arm (he was only five and still so very light), “No? You sure?”

 

“You’re silly!” the little boy cried, shrill in his joy.

 

“Well, that’s good.  Silly calls for milkshakes.  Come on, shaggy dog.  Let’s go get some and am-scray back home,” 

 

_______

 

In the end, milkshakes hadn’t exactly happened.

 

As it was, Jack’s new favourite flavour of ice cream was rocky road (courtesy of one Matthew Murdock, no doubt) and the chunky bits in it weren’t the best for blending.  Frank and Matt were on pretty good terms at the moment and wrecking the guy’s blender might have compromised that.  Frank knew from experience that property damage was rarely endearing.  

 

The hiccup in plans barely registered on Jack’s radar.  He’d always been an easygoing kid and when you promised a five-year old ice cream, they tended not to care what form it came in.  It ended up with Jack settled on the couch, a bowl of ice cream balanced carefully in his lap, his whole side pressed up tight against his father like a limpet.    Frank sat with a mug of pistachio ice cream, half forgotten, his free arm stretched out across the back of the couch.  Max, older and more rickety than he had been, was curled  protectively at their feet, splitting time between the kid he’d adopted and the grizzled vet who had adopted him.

 

Before nesting down, Jack had dashed over to the TV and rummaged around until he found a set of DVDs, the cases splashed with riots of reds, whites, and blues.  Idly amazed, Frank watched as tiny fingers popped the disc out of its case and, standing on his tip-toes, Jack fed it into the player perched under the TV.  The screen had flared to life with the menu for that old 60’s Captain America cartoon.  It took everything Frank had to suppress an amused snort.  Of course.  

 

Now they were sitting, having their ice cream and watching an animated Captain America with the subtitles on and near mute.

 

Canting his chin up, Frank asked, “Want me to turn it up, champ?”

 

Jack shook his head, too long hair whisking across his forehead.

 

“No?” 

 

His little chin bobbed up and down sharply, an emphatic ‘yes’, “Hurts daddy’s ears.”

 

Huh.

 

Max yawned and stretched at their feet, his tags jingling before he settled again.  On the TV, the Red Skull was swaggering around in all his nefarious, hand-wringing glory.  One of the most evil men in the history of the second World War reduced to an animated child’s bogeyman.  His eyes drifted over to his kid, eating ice cream and watching, wide-eyed, as the world’s evils were neatly wrapped up in short installments with a couple of right hooks and pithy quips.  He wanted to freeze this moment.  Hold it tight.  Never let it be anything other than this.

 

It was different with Jack than it was with the other kids from his school earlier.  With those kids, Frank could just watch the clock tick away the stolen seconds of their innocence, see the sands slip through the hourglass.  There was a degree of separation between his world and theirs.  It wasn’t fair, but he also wasn’t Matt.  He could stop the bad guys cold, but he couldn’t stop the real world from doing what it would do, couldn’t be so good that he could somehow guilt reality into being the better man or whatever the shit.  With his kid, though? He wanted to rip the hands of the clock, put a stopper in the hourglass.  Jack was too good for the real world...already deferring to the needs of others over his own wants.  The real world wouldn’t just  _ happen _ to him, it would rip the heart out of him if it was given the chance.

 

That harder, more bitter part of him wanted to throttle Red for imbuing that much kindness into Jack (because he was damn sure that didn’t come from him).  Christ, didn’t Matt remember his own pains well enough not to pin the same damn target to their kid?

 

He couldn’t quite bring himself to hate it, though, that unquestioning kindness.

 

Jack curled a little further into his side, a pinpoint of heat, and trust, and affection.

 

With the kid at his side, the dog on his feet, the everyday sounds of the Kitchen droning outside the window, and the soft murmur of the television running under it all, Frank felt relaxed.  He felt the weight of the last couple weeks pulling on his limbs.  Something about standing on the other side of the wringer after you’d already gone through it made you realize how damn tired you’d been the whole time.  Jack was so quiet, so still, so calm.  Sleep got Frank before he even knew it was coming.

 

______

  
  


Frank startled awake when a loud ring sliced through the sleepy stillness around him.

 

He kept his eyes closed and his breathing even while he struggled to figure out where he was.  His mind raced trying to bring him up to speed, to take stock.  The material under his back was too soft to be the warehouse he’d been staked out in.  Too warm.  He didn’t smell the raw fish stink of the waterfront here.  

 

No.  

 

No, he’d finished that job.  He’d finished that job and gotten back.  

 

Then there was Red.  The altar boy had called.  

 

Wait, called.  

 

“Papa? Phone,” a little voice whispered near him and he groaned. 

 

He was in Matt’s apartment with his kid and the stupid phone was ringing.  Get it together, Castle.  He groaned and sat up enough to pull his burner out of his back pocket.  Very few people had this number, so he barely had to look at the number when he brought it to his ear.  Still, he let the other man speak first.

 

“Frank?” Christ, but Red sounded wrung out.

 

Frank ran a thumb over the breaks in his nose, kind of admiring the paranoia that went with asking who was on the other end of the personally owned phone that YOU had dialed.

 

“Yeah, Red.  What’s up? Thought you were working,” he deliberately put air quotes around ‘working’ to indicate that this had more to do the Defenders than any above-the-table work..  

 

They weren’t talking to Jack about these things yet, so the euphemisms and carefully stressed words were a necessity.

 

“Mm, no, doing some legal legwork for Rand.  It’s just...going to take a day or two.  How’s Jack?”

 

Frank looked over to the dark-eyed little boy, trying very studiously to look like he was watching cartoons and not eavesdropping.  He looked like butter wouldn’t melt.  

 

Smirking, Frank said, “Oh I dunno.  He’s been a real tyrant.  He force fed me ice cream and made me watch cartoons.  I met insurgents more merciful in the service.”

 

“Papa!” Jack shouted, his careful ruse evaporating.

 

Matt’s voice sounded like he was smiling on the other end of the line, “I’ll write a tasteful eulogy for you.”

 

“Your lamentations warm the cockles of my heart, Red, really they do.”

 

“Careful with those three point words, Frank.  You’ll use up your quota for the month.”

 

By that point, Jack and crawled into Frank’s lap, not even shy about eavesdropping on his fathers now.  

 

“Them’s divorcing words,” the former soldier mocked.

 

He could practically hear Matt pinching his sinuses over the phone, could just see him reaching up to cradle his skull in his hand.

 

“We aren’t married, Frank.”

 

Silence stretched out between them.  In reality, it was probably only the span of a few heartbeats, but to Frank it dragged on awkwardly.  His eyes flicked down to Jack in his lap, the kid looking up at him with owlish, guileless innocence.  Christ.

 

Probably sensing the faux pas like the genius he could sometimes be, Matt rallied with, “Hey, has Jack had any  _ real _ food or is he running on sugar and cartoons right now?”

 

Frank took the lifeline for what it was, burying the other conversation to be rediscovered later like a landmine in the sand, “Don’t get your panties in a twist.  I’m gonna get up and make dinner in a minute.  Then I am giving this kid a haircut before he runs into a door.”

 

It drew a snort out of Matt, uncultured, and for a second he sounded like the boxer’s boy again like he did sometimes when he was too overwrought to cleave to his expensive Columbia education.  Exhaustion brought Matt back to basics.  Whatever Danny had him doing, it probably wasn’t whatever light ‘legal legwork’ he claimed it was.  Knowing the altar boy, he’d do it all without batting an eye, running himself so thoroughly into the ground with it that he’d come out on the other side of the damn earth before he admitted how worn out he was.  

 

That’s why he was so gobsmacked when Red offered, “Frank? How about instead we meet up at the diner.  You, me, and Jack.  I can get a break, Jack can eat something to cull the sugar crash that you’ve surely set yourself up for, and you can….I don’t know, brood sullenly in the corner or whatever.”

 

Stunned didn’t begin to describe Frank’s reaction.

 

For starters, when Matt had his teeth in a job, wild horses and packs of roving ninjas couldn’t yank him away from it.  The fact that he was making his own choice to step back from something long enough to do something as human as eating? It was so damn uncharacteristic he may as well have been a really bad life model decoy.  Maybe a Skrull.  Second and most jarring was the fact that he was offering to do something ‘family’ oriented with Frank that wasn’t a major holiday or a trade-off day with Jack.  It was so out of the ordinary it was un-fucking-precedented.  

 

Before Jack, Frank and Matt had been distant at the very best.  They’d fought each other to a stand-still more than once over the years and death had been a very real possibility once or twice.  Time had mellowed their bizarre feud into grudging occasional partnerships where their interests aligned.  Even then, those moments tended to end badly when Frank’s M.O. invariably clashed with Red’s at the end of the day.  Jack had firmed up their truce a bit, made them more steady partners.  Neither one of them was willing to step out of the kid’s life or force the other out of it, so they had settled into a domestic agreement as soon as they’d found out the kid was coming (and both of them were too damn Catholic or too damn desperate for fatherhood again to even discuss alternatives).

 

Even so, they didn’t go out of their way to spend casual time together.  

 

Custody shifts were carefully orchestrated things that allowed Jack time with both parents long enough that it wouldn’t become awkward (and short enough by the same token).  There was some cohabitation during Christmases and other major holidays in the spirit of supporting their son, but it always felt a bit like a Mexican stand-off behind the scenes.  

 

It didn’t even mean they hated each other either.  Far opposite.  At this point, Frank was pretty damn sure he’d take a bullet for Matt and he’d already seen the lengths Matt would go to for him.  It didn’t mean that they didn’t feel affectionate, either.  It was just that damage like theirs and a history like theirs didn’t just evaporate overnight.  Matt’s fucking  _ profound _ trust issues didn’t go away because they’d made one hell of a cute kid together.  Neither did Frank’s paranoia and pacing-tiger anger.  Real life didn’t work that way because, if you hadn’t noticed by this point, she could be a bit of a bitch.  Nah, Jack didn’t erase a lifetime of issues, but they made it work for his sake in their own strange way.

 

Matt’s voice came through the earpiece of the phone again, sounding less sure this time, “I mean, if you want.  I’m sure you’d like some time with Jack…”

 

Shit.  Frank had gotten wrapped up in his own head and left it too long.

 

He hastened to grasp the olive branch before Red hid it away, “You kiddin’? You offering to leave the office without getting dragged is as close to a miracle as the good lord is gonna grant us.  I’ll get Jack’s coat on and we’ll meet you there.”

 

Frank grinned at Jack and the boy gasped in delight, clamoring off the couch and shooting to the front hall to grab his coat, Max loping at his heels.

 

While he was occupied, he dropped his voice and murmured, “...You sure this is what you want, Red?”

 

Jack clattered a bit in the hall in his haste and Matt’s smile was audible in the shape of his vowels, “Yeah.  Welcome home, Frank.”

 

Sometimes their truce could feel an awful lot like winning.

  
  
  


____

 

_ Author’s Notes _

 

 

  * __Rand is Danny Rand, AKA The Iron Fist.__


  * _The Defenders were a loose cadre of heroes who worked more or less at the street level.  There were also the Heroes for Hire, but they did not indulge in extra-legal work._


  * _No, as of yet, Matt and Frank are neither married nor in any relationship outside of co-parenting.  I felt like it would be disingenuous to gloss over their histories and issues for the sake of a quick romance._


  * _If you have ANY questions about the universe, please feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll explain in future author’s notes or edit these._


  * _These chapters take me a little while to write because of the method I use.  I will write until I don’t know where to go, leave it for a day, then re-read and fix what I don’t like.  Self-beta takes five-ever._


  * _Thank you so deeply to all of my readers, to people who left kudos and didn’t, and especially to the commenters.  I intend to keep this series going.  Not sure what the next installment will be.  Maybe Jack and his friends at Avengers tower...possibly something with the X-Men pre AvX.  
_



 

 


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